Too Many Cooks in the Intelligence Kitchen

As penned on our blog earlier this week, the Petraeus stories are likely the result of an ugly turf war. Beating up on the CIA is a favorite pastime in this town and, I think, it will fail this go around. As it should.

Benghazigate will not be contained, as Obama’s acolytes thought it would be, with this sideshow aimed at the DCI. I’d like to know what did the FBI and DNI know, when did they know it … on Benghazi. Maybe time to do away with the ODNI? There is only room for one DCI and, as I am certain this matter will show, there are too may cooks in the intelligence kitchen.

Anyhow, Pruden’s piece in today’s Washington Times does a good job telling the tale:

With no facts, we have only the tangled web of lies in the changing official stories. Was the general intimidated — if not blackmailed — into joining the president, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice in their ridiculous story, told over and over, that the Benghazi attack was set off by demonstrations protesting that obscure video? Mr. Petraeus supported the president’s story about the video in testimony to Congress shortly after the assassination of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. He surely knew better.

By all accounts David Petraeus was and is a man of honor and integrity, now disgraced and broken by a familiar indiscretion born of human frailty. Looking to Congress for brave men and women who can unravel this web of deceit, a web perhaps woven of high crimes and misdemeanors, is usually a fool’s errand. But Congress is all we’ve got.

Buzz Around Town

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Blotter

The following piece by Jason Poblete, "U.S. export control reform: a view from across the pond,"was recently published in the World Export Controls Review journal WorldECR.

“It’s political kabuki and I’m not sure it [the Cuban Government] can hold together for another five years,” said Jason Poblete, a Cuban-American attorney in Washington and an outspoken critic of the Castro regime, The Miami Herald.

“The Democrats say that every four years, and its nonsense,” Jason Poblete, a lawyer who formerly worked for the Republican National Committee, told The Daily Caller.